08/12/2012

Martin McDonagh's latest film Seven Psychopaths is his follow-up to the hit In Bruges. It's just as blood-soaked, but it's left Belgium behind for the more traditional movie settings of LA and the American desert, as screenwriter Marty, played by Colin Farrell, struggles to write a script for his film that has only a name: Seven Psychopaths. Do a star-studded cast and some fabulous lines add up to another great film?

A highly-anticipated all-women production by Phyllida Lloyd of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse includes cast members from the prison theatre group Clean Break, along with stars Harriet Walter, Frances Barber and the increasingly acclaimed Cush Jumbo.

Herta Muller is the Romanian-born German novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her latest book, "The Hunger Angel", is a powerful account of life in the labour camps to which thousands of the German population in Romania were sent after 1945. To write it she spoke at length to a poet, Oskar Pastior, who was himself deported to such a life - as was Muller's own mother.

There's a new exhibition at the Royal Academy: Constable, Turner, Gainsborough and the Making of Landscape. Does the rise of British landscape painting in the 18th century have any resonance with our own attitudes towards the land?

And "Loving Miss Hatto", a new film for television written by Victoria Wood, is her version of an extraordinary story about the relationship between the pianist Joyce Hatto and her adoring husband Barry. It led him to carry out what has been called "the greatest music fraud ever".